Introduction

Copper was borne out of the desire to develop complex hardware systems using using common off-the-shelf components while using Python as the language to drive complex business logic. Such a system is common in hardware test automation, autonomous vehicles, manufacturing stations, and other robotic applications.

At the time of its inception, many solutions exist for individual components but none share a common API theme with each other. The Copper effort attempts to bring all of these under one effort with a single consistent API style with interfaces for protocol delegation.

The focus of Copper is good API by design. An API should be simple and consistent. Their affordances should be obvious–a class named Htu21d, for example, should have methods for interacting with a HTU21D temperature and humidity sensor and nothing else. There should be simple and obvious methods and properties such as temperature and humidity for this particular example.